Come hear Professor Joseph L. Bower address the question of the Future of Market Capitalism, drawing on his research for the bookCapitalism at Risk: Rethinking the Role of Business.

It promises to be a stimulating evening. Professor Bower is challenging us to identify what we will do as business leaders to meet this challenge.

JOSEPH L BOWER, Baker Foundation Professor of Business Administration, has been a leader in general management at Harvard Business School for more than 50 years. Presently, he is co-leading a project on the The Future of Market Capitalism. The first result of the project was a book co-authored with Dutch Leonard and Lynn Paine, titled Capitalism at Risk: Rethinking the Role of Business, published October 2011 by Harvard Business Press. Based on three years of work and interviews around the world, the book draws on discussions with business leaders to identify ten potential disruptors of the global market system. Presenting examples of companies already making a difference, the authors explain how business must serve both as innovator and activist-developing corporate strategies that effect change at the community, national and international levels.

The authors show that business leaders around the world shared two main concerns: first, that a number of powerful forces playing out within and across various regions could disrupt the successful progress of global capitalism; and second, that the governments of most countries, as well as the world's major international institutions, were too weak economically and politically to do much about it. Since then, researchers have been working with leading companies to understand how they are attacking some of these problems on their own.

In this program, Professor Bower will summarize their findings about the disruptive threats and discuss examples of what companies are doing to devise profitable, sustainable strategies that mitigate some of those threats. He wants to use the last part of the session to explore what you think ought to be done once people stop saying, "The government should..." - in particular, what you are going to do.